Gemma 4 just casually destroyed every model on our leaderboard except Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2. 31B params, $0.20/run

Tested Gemma 4 (31B) on our benchmark. Genuinely did not expect this.

100% survival, 5 out of 5 runs profitable, +1,144% median ROI. At $0.20 per run.

It outperforms GPT-5.2 ($4.43/run), Gemini 3 Pro ($2.95/run), Sonnet 4.6 ($7.90/run), and absolutely destroys every Chinese open-source model we've tested — Qwen 3.5 397B, Qwen 3.5 9B, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5. None of them even survive consistently.

The only model that beats Gemma 4 is Opus 4.6 at $36 per run. That's 180× more expensive.

31 billion parameters. Twenty cents. We double-checked the config, the prompt, the model ID — everything is identical to every other model on the leaderboard. Same seed, same tools, same simulation. It's just this good.

Strongly recommend trying it for your agentic workflows. We've tested 22 models so far and this is by far the best cost-to-performance ratio we've ever seen.

Full breakdown with charts and day-by-day analysis: foodtruckbench.com/blog/gemma-4-31b

FoodTruck Bench is an AI business simulation benchmark — the agent runs a food truck for 30 days, making decisions about location, menu, pricing, staff, and inventory. Leaderboard at foodtruckbench.com

EDIT — Gemma 4 26B A4B results are in.

Lots of you asked about the 26B A4B variant. Ran 5 simulations, here's the honest picture:

60% survival (3/5 completed, 2 bankrupt). Median ROI: +119%, Net Worth: $4,386. Cost: $0.31/run. Placed #7 on the leaderboard — above every Chinese model and Sonnet 4.5, below everything else.

Both bankruptcies were loan defaults — same pattern we see across models. The 3 surviving runs were solid, especially the best one at +296% ROI.

But here's the catch. The 26B A4B is the only model out of 23 tested that required custom output sanitization to function. It produces valid tool-call intent, but the JSON formatting is consistently broken — malformed quotes, trailing garbage tokens, invalid escapes. I had to build a 3-stage sanitizer specifically for this model. No other model needed anything like this. The business decisions themselves are unmodified — the sanitizer only fixes JSON formatting, not strategy. But if you're planning to use this model in agentic workflows, be prepared to handle its output format. It does not produce clean function calls out of the box.

TL;DR: 31B dense → 100% survival, $0.20/run, #3 overall. 26B A4B → 60% survival, $0.31/run, #7 overall, but requires custom output parsing. The 31B is the clear winner. Updated leaderboard: foodtruckbench.com